December 29, 2008 "The Independent" -- -We've got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don't care any more – providing we don't offend the Israelis. It's not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel's side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force.

Ever since 1948, we've been hearing this balderdash from the Israelis – just as Arab nationalists and then Arab Islamists have been peddling their own lies: that the Zionist "death wagon" will be overthrown, that all Jerusalem will be "liberated". And always Mr Bush Snr or Mr Clinton or Mr Bush Jnr or Mr Blair or …

When Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi heaved his two shoes at the head of President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad, he did something that the White House press corps should have done years ago.

Al-Zaidi listened to Bush blather that the half-decade of war he had initiated with the illegal invasion of Iraq had been "necessary for US security, Iraqi stability (sic) and world peace" and something just snapped. The television correspondent, who had been kidnapped and held for a while last year by Shiite militants, pulled off a shoe and threw it at Bush-a serious insult in Iraqi culture-and shouted "This is a farewell kiss, you dog!" When the first shoe missed its target, he grabbed a second shoe and heaved it too, causing the president to duck a second time as al-Zaidi shouted, "This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!"

Decemeber 6th sees the 2nd officially sanctioned BMP roadtrip, this time crossing the tasman to see Luciano play on a boat in Sydney harbour. The boat is due to leave 11am sharp with Greg Wilson playing a 4 hour opening set, followed by a 4 hour stint from Luciano. (cheers for the text Ninja.... blatant stealing here) After the show we'll most likey drive to mexico, perhaps with Luciano

George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America’s wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3000(1).

His backers – among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America – are calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the wo…

The Godfathers and pioneers of electronic music will perform their one and only New Zealand concert since their triumphant headline appearance at 2003’s Big Day Out.

Kraftwerk is one of the most influential bands in music history . . .

"This Is The Greatest Show London Has Ever Seen!" The Times (UK)

“Their back catalogue is raided and it becomes blindingly obvious that some of the really major players of the last 30 years - Bowie, U2, Orbital, New Order, Chemical Brothers - have ridden shotgun on this great band's work. See Kraftwerk live - you're in the presence of greatness!!” - New York Times

November 22, 2008 "The Independent" -- -I sit on the rooftop of the old Central Hotel – pharaonic-decorated elevator, unspeakable apple juice, sublime green tea, and armed Tajik guards at the front door – and look out across the smoky red of the Kabul evening. The Bala Hissar fort glows in the dusk, massive portals, the great keep to which the British army should have moved its men in 1841. Instead, they felt the king should live there and humbly built a cantonment on the undefended plain, thus leading to a "signal catastrophe".

Like automated birds, the kites swoop over the rooftops. Yes, the kite-runners of Kabul, minus Hollywood. At night, the thump of American Sikorsky helicopters and the whisper of high-altitude F-18s invade my room. The United States of America is settling George Bush's scores with the "terrorists" tryi…

John Maynard Keynes had the answer to the crisis we’re now facing; but it was blocked and then forgotten.

By George Monbiot.Published in the Guardian 18th November 2008

Poor old Lord Keynes. The world’s press has spent the past week blackening his name. Not intentionally: most of the dunderheads reporting the G20 summit which took place over the weekend really do believe that he proposed and founded the International Monetary Fund. It’s one of those stories that passes unchecked from one journalist to another.

The truth is more interesting. At the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, John Maynard Keynes put forward a much better idea. After it was thrown out, Geoffrey Crowther - then the editor of the Economist magazine - warned that “Lord Keynes was right … the world will bitterly regret the fact that his arguments were rejected.”(1) But the world does not regret it, for almost everyone - the Economist included - has forgotten what he proposed.

Birthdays, Beats and Barbecue, never a better mix of B's has there been....

feat: DalaiChris VKomotionBob DaktariJason George on the bench: Apex I'm on early,so one can enjoy the sun (fingers crossed) and get yelly at my shockingly bad selections and complete lack of mixing :)

For those speculating on whether Act leader Rodney Hide will be adding tanning studio sessions to his return of election expenses, I can suggest a possible explanation.

He wants to hide the blushes when Winston Peters unearths the small print in Act's marriage contract with National.

Having mercilessly mocked the New Zealand First leader's quest for the "baubles of office" when he was on the outside looking enviously in, Mr Hide has been indecently quick to get his snout into the public trough now he's replaced Mr Peters in the Beehive.

As part of the coalition deal, National has agreed that: "To enable Act to make a substantive contribution to the Government's programme, it will have adequate access to funding, in a bulk form or for specific projects, to enable it to commission contract research or other consultancy assistance."

Humans have overstepped the threshold of sustainability. In the mid-1980s, the capacity of the planet to sustain its human population had reached 100 per cent. The current population now has an ecological footprint equal to 1.25 planets.

If those people who live in the so-called Third World catch up with the lifestyle in the US or New Zealand, we need 4.5 planets.

We are facing one simple loss - our own disappearance from the planet, which itself will continue to live. We need to drastically reduce our ecological footprint.

One of the eerier reports on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan appeared recently in the New York Times. Journalist John Burns visited the Russian ambassador in Kabul, Zamir N. Kabulov, who, back in the 1980s, when the Russians were the Americans in Afghanistan, and the Americans were launching the jihad that would eventually wend its way to the 9/11 attacks… well, you get the idea…

In any case, Kabulov was, in the years of the Soviet occupation, a KGB agent in the same city and, in the 1990s, an adviser to a U.N. peacekeeping envoy during the Afghan civil war that followed. "They've already repeated all of our mistakes," he told Burns, speaking of the American/NATO effort in the country. "Now," he added, "they're making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright." His list of Soviet-style American mistakes included: underestimating "the resistance," an over-reliance on air power, a failure to understand the…

Chicago Disco, the baddest House jam in town, returns to Ink Bar, with special fully loaded guest James Curd. A Chicagoan native, James may be well known to you as the man behind the Greenskeepers - he's also a boundary breaking, sick as fuck DJ. Support comes from DJ Philippa, Ed the Deep House Mantis, and W Ill. Friday, November 14Ink Bar

November 10, 2008 "RT" -- - November 9th is a bitter-sweet day for Germany and her people. On that day in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated to mark Germany’s defeat and the end of World War I.

Exactly five years later, Hitler failed in a coup d'état in Munich and November 9th, 1989, also marks the fall of the Berlin Wall.

However the date of one of Germany darkest hours, which is marking its 70th anniversary, casts a dark shadow over the rest.

Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass, occurred on November 9th and 10th in 1938. The two nights of state-backed violence against Jews and their property is widely regarded as the prelude to the most shameful part of Germany’s past - the holocaust.

It is an event that former Berliner, Dr Fred Lyon, will never forget: “I was a 10 year old child and November 9th is vividly imprinted on my mind. My father awoke me and told me to get dressed as quickly as I could…

The George W. Bush StoryBy Tom Engelhardt They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers, and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen -- if you're talking about underwater land in Florida, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or three-card monte, or bizarre visions of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the U.S., or Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds rising over American cities, or a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste, or simply eternal global dominance. When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief" of a "wartime" country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting "central theaters" of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them -- the "home front" where they spent in…